She moved around the room, inspecting the books. A mix between fiction, Abbey tomes, and clothbound, title-less volumes. Her touch left a clean streak across the spines.
A book laid open across a desk pushed under the window. Jude must have left it there, ready to be picked up again the next time he visited. She stepped closer. The pages bore the same texture as her sketchbooks, the shape of the letters unfamiliar. Runes, maybe?
At her sides, her fingers twitched. The pages seemed to shiver in anticipation.
And she knew: the book wanted to be touched. It wantedhertouch upon its gilded surface. She glanced over her shoulder towards the open door. From a floor up came the faint sound of water, the creak of floorboards. Would Jude wait until the bath was full to find her, or expect her to meet him there?
Either way, she didn’t have long.
Her heart rabbited in her chest as she hovered her hand over the pages. Warmth buffeted her palm. She wanted more of it; wanted the book in its entirety. Consumed, like a gulp of air before a fall.
She dropped her hand onto the page. All at once, the world spun out from underneath her.
Shelves swirled into windows, dropping through levels of bedrooms and hallways and windswept moors as Maeve fell from one world into the next. Nausea surged up with a lash of vertigo. She tried to scream, but her lungs wouldn’t draw air, the sensation so unlike anything she’d ever experienced that it filled her lungs with pure panic.
She was standing at the edge of an unfamiliar room when the world stilled.
Some parts of it were hazy, like a painting that had been smudged before it could fully dry. Other elements were as crisp and detailed as her vision. Her body felt weightless. Not fully corporeal; more ghost than human. She looked down, seeing nothing but floorboards under her. The slightest hint of smoke layered under the sea salt when she breathed in.
Sweet and familiar – she was in the Abbey.
Was she in a memory?
The bedroom was smaller than hers and so messy she felt the low-level panic that emerged in places that didn’t subscribe to her particular level of tidiness. She looked around, heart lurching into her throat as she spotted the boy standing by the open door. Though he was younger, around the age he’d been when his icon was painted, it was unmistakably Jude.
Somehow, she had to be in a memory.Hismemory.
Jude closed the door behind him, crouching to shove a triangular piece of wood between the bottom of the door and the floor, effectively locking himself in. Cursing under his breath, he kicked aside piles of misplaced items to throw himself onto the bed. His legs were overly long and thin, ankles and wrists delicate where they poked out from his ill-fitting clothes. His hair grew in wild curls to his jaw.
Suddenly, he clamped his hands over his mouth and screamed.
An animal noise, one that sent Maeve skittering backwards into the door. Before he could shout again, a knock sounded on the closed door. The handle rattled, the wood groaning aswhoever was on the other side tried to shove it open, stopped by the wood jammed at the bottom.
Jude remained on the bed. His breath quickened as the doorjamb squealed on the stone floor.
Another knock, louder this time. ‘Jude—’ the stranger said. Their voice was fully textureless.
Maeve flinched at the sound of it. It was as though Jude’s memory had fallen short creating the voice, like he’d forgotten who was behind the door in the first place.
‘I know you’re in there. Open the door,’ they grunted. The door didn’t budge. They drummed their fingers on the wood in a rapid staccato. ‘Fine. Have it your way. I thought you’d like to know that a decision has been made.’
Jude stood up. His eyes were wet. He took one step towards the jammed door and stopped. ‘I don’t want to go. Please. This is my home.’ His voice cracked. ‘Please.’
The stranger’s sigh trickled through the door.
Was Maeve seeing his final day at the Abbey? In the memory, he looked midway through his teens, he was in his maybe early twenties now. Elden said he’d been exiled for over eight years.
Nearly a decade. He’d just been aboywhen he’d been sent away.
She had recognized the truth in theory, but the reality was so much worse than she ever could’ve imagined. The thought of this version of Jude wandering Ánhaga alone was too horrifying to consider.
‘It’s too dangerous for you to stay,’ the stranger said. Jude stumbled back to the bed. He sat heavily, fingers curling over the edge of the mattress. ‘Keeping you here endangers everyone. The whole Abbey will suffer if you remain. You don’t want that, do you, Jude? To hurt anyone else? Not after what happened.’
Who was this stranger to ask Jude, a boy barely out of childhood, to give up his home? Maeve might not have understood what Jude had done to deserve punishment, deserveexile, but no child should be made to believe his very existence hurt people.
Her left hand gave a sudden pulse of pain. She looked down, finding angry crescent moon marks pressed into her skin from her nails. Pressure built steadily in her throat. She trusted the Abbey. She’d given her life in service, an act she didn’t regret. A decision she would make again and again. But this… she didn’t know how to reconcile Jude’s tears with her long-held beliefs.
Perhaps she wasn’t seeing the whole picture. This was just a slice of a memory, after all. And from an unreliable source at that. Jude had his own biases, held nearly as strongly as Maeve’s loyalty. That was bound to impact his memories as much as it leaked into his current reality. He didn’t even remember the identity of the voice behind the door, she reasoned. Of course, the memory would be filled with inconsistencies.
